The transport vessel smelled of iron and old canvas and the particular staleness of recycled air that had been breathed by soldiers for a hundred years before any of them were born. The troop bay had no windows. The benches ran along both walls and the floor plating vibrated with the steady pulse of the mana engines beneath.

Five hours to the western continent. They spent the first hour checking gear and the next two in various states of quiet. Valerica read. Isole sat with her staff across her knees and her eyes half-closed, running her internal equilibrium, the faint opposing currents of her mana just visible as a barely-perceptible shimmer around her shoulders in the dim light of the bay. Ashe sat with her legs stretched across the bench and her arms folded and her head back against the hull, and she was either sleeping or doing a very convincing impression of it.

Vane looked at the ceiling and thought about wave nine.

Not wave one or wave five. Wave nine was the middle point — the place where the initial adrenaline was gone and the end was still too far away to pull toward. Every sustained operation he’d ever run had a wave nine equivalent. Gareth’s men clearing the lower districts, the forty-eight hours in the Clockwork Ruins, Mourn-Hold. The middle was always where the mistakes happened. The body was tired and the mind had stopped producing urgency and things that should be automatic started requiring conscious effort.

He thought about who in his squad had the most reliable middle.

He already knew the answer.

The ramp dropped at 0800 into cool spring air and the smell of old stone.

The Embrasure spread out below the drop zone for what seemed like a long time before the edges of it became visible. It was large. The topographic map had communicated scale but not texture, not the quality of a place that had housed thousands of soldiers and then been emptied and left to whatever grew into the gaps. The outer walls were still standing on three sides — massive blocks of imperial grey stone, five meters thick, now running with moss and thin root systems that had found the mortar joints over decades and worked them loose. The fourth wall was mostly rubble, collapsed inward and grown over until the stone was invisible under vegetation.

The towers were stumps. Whatever had stood above the battlements had come down and the stumps remained, irregular and hollow, with trees growing from the tops of some of them in the way trees grow from anything that holds soil and isn’t maintained.

It didn’t look like a fortress anymore. It looked like the memory of one.

They landed in the outer killing field, north sector, and Vane had a full picture of the ground within thirty seconds of his boots hitting the grass. The northwest stronghold was elevated — the terrain stepped up sharply two hundred meters ahead, and the squat reinforced structure sitting on top of it had sightlines across three natural approaches. The fourth side backed against the old wall, and there, partially obscured by a collapsed section of the inner fortification, was the vault entrance Lyra had flagged on the map. Heavy iron doors, corroded but intact, set into the base of the wall.

He looked at it for three seconds and then walked toward it.

The others fell in without being told.

To the southeast, across the wide interior of the fortress, he could see Isaac’s squad already moving toward Stronghold 6. Isaac himself was visible at distance — the quality of stillness around him was identifiable even from two hundred meters. Lyra was a step behind. They moved at pace, no wasted motion.

Vane didn’t watch them for long.

The northwest stronghold was older than the surrounding fortifications. The stone was a different color — darker, from an earlier period of construction, the kind of building that had been here before the garrison was established and had been incorporated into the overall structure rather than built as part of it. The Siege Core was in the central chamber: a crystalline node the size of a chair, currently dark, its surface etched with activation runes that would begin accumulating once a registered squad touched it.

Valerica touched it.

The runes lit pale amber. A low hum began in the walls, felt more than heard. Through the single narrow window that looked north, a faint grid of red markers appeared at the tree line — construct positions, the evaluation system populating the approach routes in real time.

Vane looked at the markers. He counted distances. He walked the outer perimeter of the stronghold twice, checking the width of the approaches, the angles of the chokepoints, the height of the old wall on the vault side and whether it offered any cover or just obstruction. He tested the vault doors. They opened. The space below was dry and low-ceilinged and smelled of mineral water, and it ran back further than his lantern reached.

Good.

He came back to the central chamber and found Ashe already in the north-facing window, looking out at the tree line.

“Twelve constructs,” she said. “Maybe fourteen. Hard to count through the trees.”

“Fourteen,” Isole said from behind him. She was standing in the center of the room with her eyes closed. “I can feel them.”

“Classification?”

“Adept-tier. Iron-framed. They are designed to look like soldiers. They walk like soldiers.” She paused. “They are slower than soldiers.”

Vane looked at the wave timer on the evaluation band on his wrist. Forty-three minutes until wave one.

“Valerica,” he said. “East approach. Learn the geometry. I want to know the exact width of the corridor between the outer wall and the building.”

She moved.

“Isole. Vault access. Map the tunnel depth.”

She moved.

He looked at Ashe.

“North approach,” he said. “You and me.”

The north approach was the widest and the most open, which made it the one that would take the most constructs. The elevated terrain meant anything coming from the tree line had to climb to reach the stronghold, which was useful for about fifty meters and then became irrelevant once the constructs were close enough for their size and momentum to matter.

Ashe walked the killing field while Vane paced the flanking positions. She walked it like she was reading it — not looking at where she wanted to be, but at where the constructs would be, where the ground would funnel them, where the density would peak. She crouched at one point and put her hand flat against the earth, feeling the slope.

“This section,” she said, “is softer than the rest. There’s a water table close to the surface. Heavy constructs will sink slightly.”

Vane looked at the patch of ground she’d indicated. It was barely distinguishable from the surrounding grass. He hadn’t noticed it.

He marked it on his tablet.

They walked the rest of the approach without speaking. He noticed she moved to his left without discussion and stayed there, the same way she’d done in the Hollows without being asked — she’d decided at some point that his spear worked better with a clear right-side lane and had simply accommodated that without making it a conversation. He noticed she was doing it again here, in new terrain, as a default.

He said nothing about it.

Wave one came at 0900 exactly.

Fourteen constructs emerged from the tree line in a loose formation that tightened as they reached the bottom of the slope. They were iron-framed, as Isole had described — roughly soldier-shaped, heavy-footed, built for sustained pressure rather than speed. Their mana signatures were low and steady. Adept-tier, the lowest classification the evaluation would generate for a squad like this.

Vane stepped back to the stronghold wall.

Ashe stepped forward.

She went through the fourteen constructs in the time it took him to drink from his canteen. No Phantom Step, no Flash Arts, just the efficient, brutal economy of a Sentinel-rank fighter addressing something that was not actually a challenge, only a task. Two axes and a systematic approach to the problem of heavy targets in an open field. The sound of it was loud and rhythmic and brief.

When it was over she turned around and walked back to the stronghold entrance, wiping her left blade on the grass. Her expression hadn’t changed.

“Clean,” she said.

“Yes,” Vane said.

She looked back at the field. The evaluation band on her wrist pulsed once as the points registered. She looked at the number for a moment.

“They’ll be heavier next wave,” she said.

“Yes.”

“How much heavier?”

Vane looked at the timer. Three hours and fifty-eight minutes to wave two. “Enough that I want all four of us on the approaches.”

She nodded, already turning toward the stronghold entrance. “Wake me when it’s forty minutes out.”

“Your rest window is four hours.”

“I know what my rest window is.” She pushed through the door without looking back. “Wake me at forty minutes.”

He watched the door settle behind her. Then he turned and looked north, at the empty killing field and the tree line beyond it, and the pale amber light of the Siege Core humming quietly at his back.

Wave two in three hours and fifty-seven minutes.

He took the perimeter.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep